Many companies have a need for sorting large quantities of incoming mail. For instance, utility companies, phone companies and credit card companies receive millions of envelopes from their customers on a daily basis. The majority of these envelopes contain an invoice stub and some type of customer payment, usually in the form of a bank check or money order. The processing of the customer payments is often dependent on information provided by the customer on the invoice stubs. In practice, some customers pay the full amount of the invoices while other customers make partial payments. Sorting of the customer payments is thereby necessitated to facilitate future billing. Additionally, many invoice stubs include some type of check-off box to enable the customer to provide predetermined information to the company. For example, a customer may mark one check-off box to indicate a change of address or mark another box to request information from the company. In certain applications, it may be desirable to provide further sorting of the customer mail based on the information provided by the check-off boxes.
Due to the large quantity of mail received by various companies, there has long been a need for efficient sorting of the incoming mail into selected groups based on various criteria. For example, downstream processing of invoices and payments is more efficient when full payments are separated from partial payments. Sorting provides efficiencies because full payments can often be power-encoded, whereas partial payments generally require hand keying. Furthermore, a separate grouping of documents that require additional attention, such as the entry of a customer's new address, may also be preferred.
Many companies attempt to sort documents simultaneously during the process in which the documents are extracted from their envelopes. Typically, an operator of a document extractor pulls documents out of a pre-slit envelope, inspects the documents, and then places the documents in desired groupings. Since the operator must perform multiple operations, e.g., document extraction, document orientation and document inspection, before finally making a decision about which group the documents belong, the operator's performance and overall throughput tend to be inefficient.
Another approach to sorting documents entails breaking up the process into two separate operations. During a first operation, the documents to be processed are extracted from their envelopes and are then oriented in a selected manner. The extraction and orientation of the documents may either be done manually or be done automatically using a high-speed extractor. Either way, a second operation must then be effected to separate the documents into desired groupings.
Manual separation is a laborious and time-consuming process. However, in many applications, manual sorting is necessary, especially when sorting requires human decision-making. In attempts to improve efficiency, there have been several automated machines developed to reduce the amount of manual sorting. Unfortunately, the automated approach to sorting documents may not be cost effective or desirable in all applications. For example, most checks accompanying invoice stubs are handwritten. As such, even the most advanced automated equipment may not be capable of reading with a desired degree of accuracy the handwritten dollar amounts entered by many customers. Additionally, many of the notes made by customers on the invoices require decision-making that an automated machine may not be capable of performing.
In accordance with the present invention, an apparatus and method are provided to enable the efficient sorting of documents. The use of the document sorter, in accordance with the present invention, permits efficient operator input with automated techniques.